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One reason I like microblogging on my own web site is that I can control the links and simple formatting. I’ve noticed lately that Twitter can’t consistently auto-link even certain domain names, for example.

This difference is illustrated well in a post I made this morning, which included timetable.fm and micro.blog. Twitter auto-linked the .blog but not the .fm. The cross-post to App.net auto-linked the .fm but not the .blog.

Here are the 3 versions:

In the final screenshot — the original from my own site, from which the others were pushed out automatically — you can see how I’ve specifically linked the domain and phrases I wanted to. It’s a minor thing, but it just looks better when the author has a little control over the formatting. (And while I don’t use it here, my own short posts can contain text in bold or italics via Markdown, too.)

Following just a week after the Dropbox support in Watermark, I’ve added two new smaller features that improve the user experience. The first is that photos hosted by Twitter are now included as inline thumbnails next to a tweet, as shown here:

The second improvement is a much faster Favorites view, which also now includes the new “stars” feature from App.net. Watermark doesn’t yet download all your existing stars (that will be rolled out to more users soon), but when it does encounter a star in your App.net timeline, that starred post will be included it this view right alongside Twitter favorites.

I’m renaming Tweet Marker Plus. Its new name — to better reflect its gradual move away from Twitter and syncing — is Watermark.

As part of the relaunch it immediately gains a new feature: App.net posts. You can now add an App.net account and it will download any posts from your friends, making them available for search. Watermark is already storing tens of millions of tweets, and I’m excited to start adding App.net posts to that archive as well.

So what happens to the basic Tweet Marker API? For now, nothing. The sync API that over 22 Twitter apps support will still be called Tweet Marker and remain Twitter-focused. Think of Watermark as a separate app: a new kind of client and archive tool, independent of Tweet Marker.